Novel Quotes

I had always said to myself that forty was the cut off point of my apprenticeship which may for some people sound like a very long one, but the novel as art is a middle-aged art.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

I was very influenced by The Magic Mountain. It's a book that had a huge impact on me. I loved that as a shape for a novel: put a bunch of people in a beautiful place, give them all tuberculosis, make them all stay in a fur sleeping bag for several years and see what happens.

I took two years away from making films to write a novel.

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.

Before trying a novel I wrote a couple of plays.

It's true that at the time I was fond of Kurt Vonnegut and Richard Brautigan, and it was from them that I learned about this kind of simple, swift-paced style, but the main reason for the style of my first novel is that I simply did not have the time to write sustained prose.

The fundamental purpose of a novel like Count Julian is to achieve the unity of object and means of representation, the fusion of treason as scheme and treason as language.

I'm working on a nonfiction book on Nepal and a novel about diasporas.

I've read short stories that are as dense as a 19th century novel and novels that really are short stories filled with a lot of helium.

It's no accident that my first novel was called Americana. This was a private declaration of independence, a statement of my intention to use the whole picture, the whole culture.

With this first novel, I am just above the foothills, but I see the path to the top, and it is my desire to write compelling stories about everything that I find of interest.

I'm writing a novel about two actresses who go to New York, because that's what I know about. One has lost touch with reality, disappears and is picked up by a man.

But The Same Sea is set precisely in this Israel, which never makes it to the news headlines anywhere. It is a novel about everyday people far removed from fundamentalism, fanaticism nationalism, or militancy of any sort.

The really great novel tends to be the exact negative of its author's life.

You're getting everyone's point of view at the same time, which, for me, is the perfect state for a novel: a cubist state, the cubist novel.

Every once in a while I feel the tremendous force of the novel. But it does not stay with me.

With 'Darkly Dreaming Dexter,' we as a group of writers had to take a rather thin novel and spread it out over the course of 12 episodes, and not only 12 episodes, but lay in story for everyone that's going to take you through five years.

I think every age has a medium that talks to it more eloquently than the others. In the 19th century it was symphonic music and the novel. For various technical and artistic reasons, film became that eloquent medium for the 20th century.

When I look back over my novels what I find is that when I think I'm finished with a theme, I'm generally not. And usually themes will recur from novel to novel in odd, new guises.

So, I outlined a horror novel and started writing.

The surprise with which a detective novel concludes should set up tragic vibrations which run backward through the entire structure.

The reason I love comics more than anything else is that the longest story will be just a few pages. With a novel, it takes so many pages to get to one thing happening.

I don't begin a novel or a screenplay until I know the ending. And I don't mean only that I have to know what happens. I mean that I have to hear the actual sentences. I have to know what atmosphere the words convey.

You hear the best stories from ordinary people. That sense of immediacy is more real to me than a lot of writerly, literary-type crafted stories. I want that immediacy when I read a novel.

The novel is the first art form that is an honest-to-god commodity. That's what makes it different from both high art and folk art.

By asking a novel question that you don't know the answer to, you discover whether you can formulate a way of finding the answer, and you stretch your own mind, and very often you learn something new.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

I suppose I started writing seriously at 16 years old. I thought I wrote a novel at 16 and sent it to New York! They sent it back because it wasn't novel.